Consumers utilize the internet from devices such as mobile phones and portable computing devices to conduct trustworthy online banking transfers or internet-based purchase services and goods with a credit card account. These processes use various electronic token and encryption means with passwords, caller ID technology and other biometric security functions to authorize access or complete a purchase online. In contrast, voting in official governmental and other election vote processes have not been able to enjoy the same automated trustworthy methods due to the absence of a reliable paper-verifiable method to count a vote using the internet with a method to mitigate voter fraud.
The current state of art in online voting for state, local and international governmental and other trustworthy elections (e.g., shareholder proxy vote, election of a board of directors, a vote on a local community issue or policy, popularity selection process, etc.) is primarily directed to applications for voter registration that can be accomplished online, but not voting online by internet with a highly reliable or trustworthy voter verification and authentication data method. Instead, a voter is registered by internet methods and computer printouts to record a signature and instructed to then vote at a physical polling location where a voter's identity is re-authenticated and re-verified. Only then is a printed ballot presented for selection and recording.
The other current approach is to use ordinary absentee ballots distributed by U.S. Postal Service mail to the voter's home address and then to allow voters to return them online. A voter typically goes to a web site and downloads a file containing an absentee ballot and a cover sheet. After printing out the file, the voter fills out the cover sheet (giving his name and other signature and certification information) and the ballot. He/she scans the cover sheet and ballot, and uploads the scan to a web site or sends the ballot as fax. Election authority or authorized officials or individuals collect and print the resulting file, and treat the printout like an ordinary absentee ballot.
Many criticize the security of these prior art systems since distribution of blank ballots under the prior art cannot be secure enough since returning filled-out ballots from an ordinary computer and browser presents authentication and security risks. There are integrity and authentication issues because several things can go wrong here: an attacker could subvert the voter's computer and have it modify the ballots before sending them; they could get phished and the phisher could modify their ballot appropriately before passing it on to the central site. Finally, the attacker could subvert the central database server and modify the ballots before they are printed out. These current prior art methods provide no way for a voting authority or other administrator of the voting process to verify or authenticate the physical Postal Service mailing address of the voter or geographical location of the voter as a data authentication and verification method to accept a vote for processing using a consumer device. Further supporting the method's improvement over prior art is the fact geographical data reported by consumer device is reliable and can be considered highly resistant to any broad scale attack or “spoofing.” That is because a consumer cannot gain easy access to a personal consumer device to open it and alter. In addition, each device typically includes a normal password authentication requirement to access the device and these and other SIM card identity elements, in combination, are enough to avoid a casual hacker installing a rogue GPS driver onto a consumer device for the purpose of misleading location data of the device for voting.
While the current art does use tools of internet to make a significant impact on current paper-based fill-in ballot election systems, they have heretofore been unknown to use the method of cell tower triangulation geolocation data at the time of a vote, and capturing and assembling data reported by a consumer device with other voter identity and Mobile Sensor API device sensor data gathered and sent to a computer server over the internet, as a data authentication and verification method in context of internet voting systems or methods.
U.S. Publication No. 20050101307 by Torsten et al. teaches a method to perform voting, as well as a vote server, a mobile terminal and a computer program product used for voting. The vote server generates a unique transaction number associated with a specific voting item and a specific subscriber. It transmits the unique transaction number together with the specific voting item to the mobile terminal of the specific subscriber. The mobile terminal sends back a response comprising the vote together with the transaction number and a unique identification number associated with the subscriber of the mobile terminal. The vote server compares the received transaction number and the received identification number with stored values and accepts the vote contained in the response, if the check is positive. The application also describes the application of a SIM card when a mobile terminal receives a voting item from a vote server and performs a subscriber authentication based process.
U.S. Publication No. 20090072032 by Cardone, teaches an apparatus for executing a trusted electronic voting system under the control of an election authority comprising: a. at least one electronic voting machine; b. an election configuration for said voting machine in said electronic voting system; and c. a trusted computing platform for said voting machine in said electronic voting system. While Cordone does provide a trustworthy voting platform, such platform is based on voting at a polling place and fails to teach the advantages and improvements of a voting with a consumer mobile device.
U.S. Publication 20090187492 by Hammad shows how the GPS feature in mobile phones has been used for authentication outside the internet election voting environment. The Hammad invention is directed to authenticating a portable consumer device that is used to conduct a transaction at a merchant. The portable consumer device is authenticated based on location data coming from at least two different sources. For example, first location information may be received from a mobile communication device possessed by a consumer and second location information may be received from a POS terminal operated by a merchant conducting the transaction. If the first location information and the second location information correspond to each other (e.g., they match), then the server computer may authenticate the financial credit card payment transaction. The method of Hammad does not teach registering a geographical location of a voter's postal mail delivery address prior to an election wherein the geographical location consists of longitude and latitude coordinates and storing the resultant registration data in a computer server. It does not teach voting system and methods and instead is directed to financial transaction processing methods. Instead, Hammad 2009/0187492 describes using GPS function of mobile device to authenticate, but in that case the mobile device has to be in the same location more or less to a Point-of-Sale (POS) terminal when the device is used for a sale transaction. The teaching of verifying that a mobile device is where it is supposed to be geographically to carry out a transaction is known. The instant invention for an internet-based mobile vote transaction verified by postal mail delivery address instead of a sale is unobvious and produces unpredictable results. The instant application also differs in requiring registration of the geographical location of the voter's postal address prior to an election. Hammad doesn't require any pre-registration since the Hammad transaction is not carried out at the mobile device owner's home or registered postal mail address in a computer server system.
U.S. Publication 20090149192 by Vargus teaches a device locate service where the GPS feature in mobile phones can be used to locate or remote manage mobile devices such that when the device is misplaced, the device locate service can communicate and provide GPS location signal for a method to disable the device and locate it.
Internet voting using a mobile phone device has also been previously discussed in the Republic of Estonia, a country in Northern Europe. In 2007, Estonia became the world's first country to allow voters in a national parliamentary election to cast their ballots over the Internet. To vote, Estonians put their identification card, which has an electronic chip on it, into a reader attached to their computer and then enter two passwords. The votes are then encrypted for security and opened by the national election committee using a “private key” on Election Day. The Estonian method has not been adopted in any other country because of certain problems with exclusive use of SIM cards for authentication, among which are the fact that the SIM cards are controlled by cellular network carriers and have limited web services processing capabilities.
Numerous other prior art and authentication technique with a consumer device such as a mobile phone or Smartphone is typically applied as a caller ID function of the home phone number or other biometric data function when a consumer calls their local cable company to enquire or to pay a bill. Such automated systems know automatically that a call is from that person's account based on the phone number transmitted by the phone device that is captured by a Caller ID method at a cable company. Similarly, new credit cards sent by postal mail must often be activated by calling from one's home number on record in the database of the card issuer. Under these methods it is relatively possible to change the phone identification number that is shown in a Caller ID function to another number for the purpose of misleading or conducting a fraudulent authentication method. Caller ID methods suffer from certain disadvantages when applied to mobile device voting authentication. For example, not all mobile devices allow caller identification by the recipient, and second, the voter may have more than one mobile device and would have to register the phone number for each of them so the voting system would recognize each device.
In contrast to current Caller ID methods, there are no known methods for a device user to modify the GPS data coordinate transmission processes without disabling the entire GPS data sensor that would render one or more of instant method teachings by Klein to become inoperable. Therefore, the recent technological achievements in the ability of the latest consumer devices to determine and report cell tower triangulation geolocation data coordinates, together with other identity data over the internet, creates a significantly more trustworthy method to enable a voting process with a consumer device associated with the latitude and longitude data matching to a pre-registered Postal Service mail address data distance range to perform a novel and unpredictable voting method.